Fear of Life

  a short novel

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  PART ONE

  The Spectacur Mundanity of Being Alive

  Chapter One: ‘Me, Myself, and My 305’— Eli —

  Most people avoid death. I’m willing to embrace it.

  Don’t get me wrong — I’m the biggest coward there is. I don’t go out of my way to court risk. I don’t rock climb, bungee jump, swim, take rides from strangers — unverified — and I haven’t been on a Jamaican bus in thirty years for reasons that involve physics, faith, and the distinct possibility that the driver was navigating by vibes alone. I just know the truth most people spend their whole lives avoiding: I am one breath away from not breathing. Each inhale is a negotiation. Each exhale is a miracle nobody bothered to invoice. The moment I can’t do either, I’m dead. That’s not morbid. That’s math.

  I don’t understand the fifty percent of the world that is gung-ho about being here. Sure, life has its moments. Sunsets, cheese, the first sip of coffee before your brain fully registers it as a betrayal of everything you hoped the day would be. But when you dissect it — really pull the ribcage open and have a look — it doesn’t provide that many great moments. Or maybe it’s just me.

  I was born poor. Not poverty-as-aesthetic poor, not vintage-thrift-store-chic poor. Actually, genuinely, sharing-a-bed-with-three-other-humans poor. I knew from a young age that I was different — craved silence, craved solitude, needed whole rooms of quiet the way other people need oxygen — and I was trapped in a household that operated at the decibel level of a construction site inside a carnival. Poverty is not my friend, but it clings to me like a bad BV — persistent, embarrassing, and somehow always worse right before something important.

  Which brings me to this fine Friday morning in March. The weather felt like Spring had briefly remembered it was supposed to show up. I had four thousand dolrs in my account. Technically, I had five hundred. Three thousand five hundred of that was already pre-scheduled for deduction on Monday, which meant my account had the audacity to dispy a number that did not reflect my reality, much like my bathroom mirror, my bathroom scale, and my general sense of optimism.

  I took a nap at three a.m. — which I’m aware says a lot about my sleep schedule and my life choices — and woke up at 9:15 to discover that the Canada Revenue Agency does not wait for Monday. It does not wait for Spring. It does not wait for you to emotionally prepare or consume a reasonable breakfast. It had already helped itself to my account, left 305 behind like a passive-aggressive tip, and my rent NSF was already loading in the wings like a vilin waiting for their cue.

  I cried. Ugly cried. The kind with sounds.

  I called off work, which I know makes no financial sense, but if I had to smile at one more person for minimum wage in this economy — if I had to look at Linda’s face, with her particur brand of performative busyness and unsolicited feedback on my time-management — I was going to do something that would make the CRA the least of my problems.

  Instead, I drank a cheap beer, pulled up my BL audio drama, and sank into my Ikea pull-couch like a man accepting his own funeral. The story was pying — some gorgeous, emotionally unavaible CEO named Damien and his long-suffering secretary — and as usual, Damien was wearing some variation of a midnight velvet suit. I have a theory that whoever writes these stories has a sponsorship deal with the colour green, specifically emerald, specifically velvet. It’s bespoke or it’s nothing.

  That was when Maxwell appeared on screen.

  He wasn’t pying Damien. He was being interviewed, something about his new film, and he was wearing a perfectly ordinary grey shirt that had absolutely no business looking like that on his body. Caramel skin. Full lips. Lashes that God issued him as a personal insult to everyone else on earth. He smiled at something the interviewer said, and I felt it in my lower back.

  Maxwell. My Maxwell. Well — not my Maxwell. Maxwell from high school. Maxwell who didn’t know I existed except for that one time I slid a handwritten love confession under his locker door like a Victorian ghost and then ran before he could open it. Maxwell who had responded, who had been kind, who had wanted to meet — and I had declined because I was seventeen, self-loathing, and convinced he deserved someone who at least owned a full-length mirror without looking away from it.

  I had tracked his acting career from a comfortable stalker’s distance ever since migrating to Canada. Watched every film, every interview, saved exactly zero of them because I wasn’t that far gone. I just… watched. The way you watch a comet. You know it doesn’t belong to you. You watch it anyway.

  I was mid-thought about those lips and the precise catalogue of pces I would theoretically like to deploy them when everything went sideways.

  The couch swallowed me. Or I fell through it. Or the world folded at the crease.

  I don’t know how else to describe it. One moment I was on my living room floor in a beer-stained t-shirt, and the next moment I wasn’t.

  ? ? ?

  Chapter Two: ‘The Bed is Not Mine and Neither Are the Handcuffs’— Eli —

  The ceiling was not my ceiling.

  My ceiling has a water stain shaped like a disappointed parent. This ceiling was cream, high, and entirely too elegant to belong to anyone who has ever stress-eaten crackers over a sink at 2 a.m. There were exposed beams. Architectural beams. The kind that imply someone chose them.

  I was in a bed. The sheets alone had more thread count than my annual income. My wrists were attached to the headboard via handcuffs — not aggressively, but with a casual confidence that suggested this was someone’s normal Tuesday — and I was, to put it delicately, wearing nothing but the concept of myself.

  Beside me, a man was snoring softly. Not the grating, apocalyptic snoring of my upstairs neighbour Gerald, who sounds like a malfunctioning engine at three a.m. This was… peaceful. Rhythmic. Almost polite.

  I turned my head.

  I blinked.

  I blinked again, slower, the way you do when you’re hoping reality is going to take the hint and revise itself.

  Maxwell.

  Objectively, chronologically, cosmically Maxwell. Same jaw. Same shes doing their whole devastating thing even in sleep. A small scar near his left eyebrow that I had noticed seventeen years ago and apparently retained in my brain’s long-term storage like a cursed archivist.

  I bit my lip. Hard. There was pain. Pain meant real. Real meant I was in Maxwell’s bed, handcuffed, naked, in what appeared to be a tastefully expensive apartment that did not belong to this dimension or tax bracket.

  I had two thoughts simultaneously. The first was: I hope I don’t wake up. The second was: I really, really should not have eaten that brownie.

  It wasn’t even a special brownie. At least, it wasn’t supposed to be. My neighbour Deb had left it outside my door with a note that said ‘you look like you need this more than I do,’ which I had interpreted as neighbourly concern and not as a pharmaceutical handoff. I was reconsidering that interpretation now.

  Maxwell stirred. Rolled. Put his head between my legs — not like that, he was just repositioning, the man had his cheek on my thigh like it was a perfectly reasonable pillow — and looked up at me with eyes still soft from sleep and a smile that should have come with a discimer.

  “Good morning, hubby,” he said. His voice was exactly what it sounded like in interviews, except inches away and aimed entirely at me. “Was your sleep as uncomfortable as my back? Are you ready to pay for my distress?”

  Hubby.

  He called me hubby.

  I have never been someone’s hubby. I have barely been someone’s ‘we should do this again sometime.’ My most recent romantic interaction involved a man on a dating app who unmatched me after I sent a meme, and the meme was funny. I stand by the meme.

  I didn’t speak. Speaking felt like the kind of thing that would end this, and I was not prepared to return to my 305 and my couch and my ceiling with the disappointed stain. So I nodded. Just nodded. Like a man of few words and many secrets.

  Maxwell, apparently content with this response, crawled up the length of me with the unhurried confidence of someone who had done this before and had every intention of doing it again. He buried his face in my neck, kissed it, nipped at it with a softness that was deeply unfair. Then he moved lower.

  I will spare the full details, not because I don’t remember them — I remember them with the high-definition crity of a trauma I very much want to keep — but because some things deserve to exist privately. What I will say is this: Maxwell treated my body like he had a map and all the time in the world. He knew about the nipples — how, I don’t know, this was theoretically a dream, maybe I’m the one who wrote that in — and he was methodical and generous and entirely too comfortable with himself in a way that made me want to both weep and appud.

  I passed out sometime after. Not from distress. From the sheer physiological effort of experiencing joy.

  When I surfaced, the handcuffs were gone, and there were strong arms around my waist in a grip that said: you’re not going anywhere and I’m not asking. I traced his eyebrows with my fingertip. His eyeshes. The line of his mouth. I wanted to archive it properly this time. I wanted to keep it.

  Ten minutes ter, a grandfather clock chimed somewhere in the apartment.

  And I was on my floor.

  My Ikea floor. My crackers-in-the-sink, CRA-assisted, 305 floor. The TV was still on. Maxwell’s interview was still pying. He was ughing at something the interviewer said, looking absolutely fine and entirely unbothered, two-dimensional and behind gss where he belonged.

  I y there for a moment. Then I catalogued the situation: parts of me hurt. Parts of me hurt in ways that do not happen from dreaming, no matter how vivid. I know my body. I have lived in it for thirty-seven disappointing years. I know the difference between imagined and actual.

  I stumbled to the bathroom.

  I looked in the mirror.

  Bite marks. On my neck. On my colrbone. Small, deliberate, evenly spaced. The scar near my left eyebrow — not mine, never mine, I didn’t have one this morning — wait.

  I leaned closer.

  There was a small mark near my left eyebrow. Not a scar. A faint impression, like a brand cooling on skin. Like a reminder.

  The mirror offered no expnation. Neither did the universe. The universe, in my experience, does not expin itself. It just deducts from your account and leaves 305 and waits to see what you’ll do next.

  I sat on the edge of my bathtub and thought about it for a long time.

  Then I got up, made coffee, and started wondering how you find a supernatural door that you fell through by accident and figure out if it has a handle on the other side.

  PART TWO

  The Man on the Other Side of the Gss

  Chapter Three: ‘Someone Keeps Appearing in My Bedroom and I’m Choosing Not to File a Report’— Maxwell —

  There are things that don’t have expnations. Maxwell Osei — Maxwell to everyone, Max to no one who wished to keep their kneecaps — had built a career, a brand, and a general philosophy on this premise. Not everything required interrogation. Some things you simply accepted.

  The man who kept appearing in his bed was one of those things.

  The first time, Maxwell had assumed he’d had more whiskey than he’d accounted for. He’d woken to find someone beside him — medium height, dark-skinned, soft in the middle in a way that suggested life had recently been unkind to him — sleeping with the profound, boneless relief of someone who hadn’t slept properly in weeks. Maybe months. His face in sleep was younger than whatever he was carrying awake.

  Maxwell had, reasonably, said nothing. He’d made coffee. When he’d returned to the bedroom, the man was gone. The sheets still held the shape of him.

  The second time, the man had been awake. Handcuffed to the headboard, which Maxwell had not done — he’d found him that way, already there, already in his room like a very specific haunting — and looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone calcuting the precise odds of their life decisions.

  Maxwell had recognised him instantly. Some part of him — the part that still lived seventeen years ago in a school square, watching a quiet boy two years behind him deliberately choose the same bus route three times a week — had known before his conscious brain had caught up.

  Elijah. Eli. The boy who had slipped a letter under his locker and vanished before Maxwell had even finished reading it. The boy who had agreed to meet and then hadn’t shown, and Maxwell — seventeen and stupid and proud — had told himself he didn’t care, which had only been partially true. The boy who had sent one more message, brief and apologetic, and then migrated to Canada and disappeared into the world.

  Maxwell had looked him up, once or twice, over the years. Eli wasn’t hard to find — LinkedIn, occasionally social media, the digital footprint of someone who existed online with the minimum required effort. Maxwell had looked. He hadn’t reached out. He wasn’t sure what he would have said.

  And now Eli was in his bed. In Toronto — Maxwell was filming there, two weeks of interiors, a boutique hotel suite that he’d upgraded to an apartment because he couldn’t function in a room with only one window — handcuffed and naked and very carefully not speaking, as if speaking would break something.

  Maxwell had pyed along. He’d called him hubby because he didn’t know what else to call the situation, and because the word made Eli’s whole face do something complicated and startled and almost happy, and Maxwell found he very much wanted to keep producing that expression.

  He hadn’t pnned what happened next. That was his story and he was keeping it.

  Eli disappeared when the grandfather clock struck ten. One moment he was there — warm, solid, leaving small fingertip traces across Maxwell’s face like he was memorising it — and then he wasn’t. The arms Maxwell had settled around his waist closed on nothing. The sheets held his shape for a moment and then let it go.

  Maxwell y still for a long time looking at the ceiling.

  Then he got up, went to his production schedule, identified which evenings he had free, and began thinking seriously about grandfather clocks.

  ? ? ?

  Chapter Four: ‘The Internet Has Answers for Everything Except This’— Eli —

  I googled ‘woke up in someone else’s bed supernatural,’ and the results were not helpful. Reddit had opinions, which is not the same thing. Three different forums suggested astral projection, which I am not qualified for and which seems like the kind of skill that requires more than a brownie and a financial crisis.

  I googled ‘unexpined bite marks morning after vivid dream.’ WebMD suggested I might be stressed.

  Thanks, WebMD. Invaluable.

  I went back to work on Monday because 305 does not stretch to a second day off. Linda noticed the marks on my neck with the precise, hungry attention of a woman who has been waiting years for something to comment on, and I told her it was a skin condition, which she did not believe but could not disprove. I spent my shift thinking about ceiling beams and thread counts and the way Maxwell’s voice sounds when it’s not coming through a phone speaker.

  That night, I sat on my couch and wondered if it would happen again. If I had to do something specific. If there was a ritual, a requirement, a precise quantity of beer and self-pity and BL audio dramas that constituted a portal.

  I tried the brownie theory first. Deb gave me another one, no questions asked, with the serene confidence of a woman who had seen everything. I ate it on my couch. I waited. I watched the ceiling.

  Nothing.

  So it wasn’t the brownie.

  I spent the next three nights watching Maxwell’s interviews. Not obsessively — I want that on record — but with the focused attention of someone conducting research. I was looking for something. I didn’t know what. He kept ughing at things interviewers said, kept tilting his head a certain way, kept looking completely unbothered by the world in a manner I found simultaneously enviable and infuriating.

  On the fourth night, at approximately 11 p.m., I fell asleep on my couch mid-interview.

  And woke up somewhere else entirely.

  ? ? ?

  Chapter Five: ‘This is Either a Pattern or a Problem’— Maxwell —

  The second time Eli appeared, Maxwell was awake.

  He’d been sitting in the armchair by the window reading through a script that was not as interesting as the publicist had cimed, and at 11:17 p.m. — Maxwell noted the time because he was, professionally, a details person — there was a shift in the air. Not dramatic. Not a fsh of light or a cp of thunder. Just a shift, like pressure equalising. And then Eli was on his couch.

  His couch. Maxwell’s couch, in Maxwell’s Toronto apartment. Eli, in what appeared to be a faded t-shirt from some event five years ago and sweatpants with a small hole near the left knee, lying on Maxwell’s couch with his mouth slightly open and his eyeshes doing their own resting thing on his cheekbone.

  Maxwell put down the script.

  He went and got a bnket. He put it over Eli. He went back to the armchair. He watched him sleep for approximately four minutes, which he acknowledged was a little much but which he filed under extenuating circumstances, and then he went back to the script.

  He was on page forty when Eli made a small, confused sound and opened his eyes.

  They looked at each other.

  “Hi,” Maxwell said.

  Eli made a noise that was not quite a word.

  “There’s water on the table,” Maxwell said. “And I made tea about twenty minutes ago. It’s probably still warm.”

  Eli sat up slowly. Looked around with the careful attention of someone checking that reality was the version they were expecting. He looked at Maxwell. Then at the bnket on his p. Then at Maxwell again.

  “You covered me,” Eli said. His voice was low and a little rough from sleep and approximately seventeen years of history colpsed into three words.

  “You looked cold,” Maxwell said.

  Eli picked up the tea. Held it in both hands. Stared into it like it owed him an expnation. “I don’t know how I got here,” he said, finally.

  “I know,” Maxwell said. “This is the third time.”

  Eli’s head came up sharply.

  “First time you were asleep,” Maxwell continued, with the calm of a man who had made peace with impossible things and had moved on to logistics. “Second time you were — awake, and I was —” He paused. “We were.” He paused again. “And now here.”

  Silence. Eli was doing the complicated face again, the startled-almost-happy one, and Maxwell found it more interesting than the script on page forty.

  “I wrote you a letter,” Eli said. “When I was seventeen.”

  “I know,” Maxwell said. “I still have it.”

  Eli stared at him. “Why?”

  Maxwell considered the question. There were several honest answers. He chose the simplest one.

  “Because it was the most honest thing anyone had ever said to me. And you were going to show up, and then you didn’t, and I kept it in case you did eventually.” He held Eli’s gaze across the apartment. “I’ve been in Toronto for three weeks. You live here. So apparently eventually is now.”

  The grandfather clock in the corner — a prop from a previous film that he’d bought on impulse, which he was beginning to suspect was not an impulse at all — ticked quietly between them.

  Eli looked at it. Then at Maxwell. “That clock,” he said. “When it chimes. That’s when I—”

  “Leave,” Maxwell finished. “Yes. I’ve noticed.” He paused. “I’ve been keeping it wound.”

  Something happened in Eli’s face at that. Something cracked open and tried to put itself back together and didn’t quite manage it.

  Maxwell stood up, crossed the apartment, and sat on the couch beside him. Not close enough to be a statement. Close enough to be a choice.

  “Tell me something true,” Maxwell said. “Something you wouldn’t say if you thought you were dreaming.”

  Eli looked at him for a long time. The clock ticked. Outside, Toronto went about its business, indifferent as cities always are.

  “I’m terrified,” Eli said. “Not of this. Not of you. I’m terrified that I’m going to go back. Every time. And one time I’ll go back and the clock won’t wind anymore and that’ll be it and I’ll have to watch you through a screen again and pretend that’s enough.”

  Maxwell nodded. He had, quietly and without fuss, been afraid of the same thing.

  “So don’t go back through the screen,” he said. “I have your number. I have always had your number. I looked you up when I nded in Toronto and I talked myself out of calling you exactly six times.” He held up his phone. The contact was already there. Elijah. One unsent message draft that said simply: ‘Hi. It’s Maxwell. I’m in Toronto.’

  The clock chimed.

  Eli’s hand, which had been reaching toward the phone, nded instead briefly on Maxwell’s wrist. Warm. Real. Present.

  And then he was gone.

  Maxwell sat with the impression of a hand on his wrist for a moment.

  Then he opened the message. Deleted ‘Hi. It’s Maxwell. I’m in Toronto.’

  Typed: ‘I know you can hear this. Call me when you’re ready. I’ll be here.’

  Sent it.

  Then he got up, made more tea, and waited.

  PART THREE

  The Door Has a Handle After All

  Chapter Six: ‘Fine. Fine. I’ll Call.’— Eli —

  I nded on my floor at 11:59 p.m. on a Tuesday, which was becoming my brand, and y there for a moment cataloguing the ceiling, my life choices, and the specific quality of my feelings, which were numerous and not small and therefore inconvenient.

  My phone buzzed.

  I read the message.

  I put the phone down on my chest and stared at the ceiling for a long time.

  My ceiling has a water stain shaped like a disappointed parent. I have always hated that stain. Tonight, for reasons I could not entirely expin, it looked less judgmental than usual.

  The thing about being someone who has made a philosophy of expecting the worst is that the worst becomes comfortable. Manageable. You know its shape. Hope, on the other hand, is a different animal entirely — bigger and less predictable and significantly harder to contain if it gets loose.

  I was thirty-seven years old, three hundred and five dolrs to my name on a good week, living in an apartment that smelled faintly of someone else’s ambitions and my own abandoned ones. I had a job I attended because electricity costs money, a couch that had absorbed more of my feelings than any therapist, and a seventeen-year-old love letter that apparently still existed somewhere in Maxwell Osei’s possession.

  He kept it.

  He kept the letter.

  I picked up my phone.

  I put it down.

  I picked it up again.

  The message sat there, patient and undemanding: ‘I know you can hear this. Call me when you’re ready. I’ll be here.’

  It didn’t say ‘if you want to.’ It didn’t hedge. It said I’ll be here with the calm confidence of someone who had decided that the outcome was already settled and was simply waiting for the logistics to catch up.

  I typed: ‘This is Eli.’

  I deleted it.

  I typed: ‘Hi.’

  I stared at it.

  I added: ‘I’m awake.’

  My phone rang six seconds ter.

  His voice, when it came through, was exactly the way it was in the apartment. Not the interviewed, projected, professionally warm version. Just his voice, te at night, unhurried.

  “You actually called,” he said.

  “You said you’d be there.”

  “I did say that.” A brief pause. “How’s your floor?”

  I looked around my apartment. At the Ikea couch and the malm bed through the doorway and the CRA-assisted 305 and all the rest of it.

  “Mine,” I said. Which wasn’t exactly an answer but was, I thought, the most important part.

  “I have two more weeks in Toronto,” Maxwell said. “And then I’m back in London for two months and then I have nothing scheduled until February. I’m telling you my calendar because I think you’re the kind of person who needs to know the variables before you decide anything. I could be wrong.”

  “You’re not wrong,” I said.

  “So here are the variables: I’m in Toronto until the seventeenth. I have a grandfather clock that I’m not giving up. And I have a letter that I’ve moved across four countries because I couldn’t expin why I kept it except that it felt like the kind of thing that wasn’t finished yet.”

  I was quiet for a moment.

  “I’m not handsome,” I said. “I haven’t seen the gym since — let’s say a while. I have a Linda at work who makes every shift a spiritual test, my rent is mostly theoretical at this point, and I cried this morning about a bank notification.”

  “Okay,” Maxwell said.

  “I’m just listing the variables,” I said.

  “I heard them,” he said. “I’m still on the phone. Do you want to get coffee tomorrow?”

  I looked at my ceiling. The water stain looked, if anything, almost encouraging.

  “Yes,” I said.

  It came out steadier than I expected. Maybe because somewhere between the portal and the handcuffs and the bite marks that sted three days and a text message sent at midnight, I had stopped waiting for the worst to arrive and started considering the faint, terrifying, statistically unlikely possibility that something else might show up instead.

  Not hope exactly. Not yet.

  But the door on the other side of the gss, it turned out, did have a handle.

  And I had just put my hand on it.

  ? ? ?

  — fin —